Screening for breast cancer represents one of modern medicine's success stories. However, the continued large fraction of false positives in current diagnostic protocols often leads to biopsy/pathology procedures that cause considerable pain, anxiety, healthcare cost, and possibly increased malignancy risk, but which are potentially avoidable. To address this problem, there have been recent calls for the increased use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in breast screening.
The problems associated with false positive results are not unique to breast cancer screening. Other cancers suffer from large numbers of false positive results, causing significant stress as well as often requiring additional costly and painful procedures to confirm or deny the initial results.